Great Explanation of How Integrated Resource Planning Would Help Keep WV Rates Low

Professor James Van Nostrand of the WVU Law School has published a white paper explaining why integrated resource planning is vital to WV’s electricity future. Mr. Van Nostrand shows clearly how IRP, also known as least cost planning, can help the WV PSC get control of WV’s spiraling electric rates.

Automatic acceptance? No. It’s for us to teach acceptance. We tried last year and now are faced with more than $2B of new coal plant debt that can be directly tied to lack of integrated resource planning. It’s the “I told you so” moment.

Thanks, Keryn, for pointing out the immediate problem that IRP would have solved. In this post, I wanted to introduce Prof. Van Nostrand’s paper for itself, without my own spin or connection to the plans that both AEP and FirstEnergy are implementing to shift money losing coal plants selling their power on the open market to WV regulated utilities where rate payers are forced to pay for these plants and provide a guaranteed return on equity for them. As I noted in an earlier post, FirstEnergy simply dismissed aggressive energy efficiency and demand management from their Harrison coal plant dump “plan.” This approach is fundamentally deceptive and is designed to exclude from PSC decision making the least expensive and most efficient solutions to FirstEnergy’s problems in WV. If WV had had integrated resource planning in place, say, two years ago, the PSC would now have the tools to independently analyze ALL capacity resources, and FirstEnergy wouldn’t be able to get away with pulling this kind of charade. But the Legislature failed us, and we are left largely at the mercy of AEP and FirstEnergy.

And the legislature failed us because AEP’s & FE’s lobbyists were tippy-toeing around the Capitol with campaign contribution checks in hand. AEP & FE knew they’d soon be “selling” West Virginians a pig in a poke that would not be the best option under true integrated resource planning. Okay, so I’m politically incorrect. Don’t care.